Process assessment techniques are often used to characterize the performance of, e.g., a company, organization or project, with respect to their development practices in a particular type of technology. For example, software process assessment techniques are known in the art and utilized to characterize performance of various software development projects. Such techniques may make use of, e.g., a capability maturity model and a database of performance data on related projects in order to provide a basis for performance comparison. In a typical arrangement, a questionnaire may be administered to a designated number of participants associated with a given software development project. The responses of the participants are processed to determine an average score for the project, and scores determined for other related projects, e.g., by other companies, may be made available as part of a summary report.
A drawback of existing process assessment techniques is that such techniques are unable to provide adequate display of process assessment information. For example, existing process assessment techniques fail to incorporate question-by-question and category-by-category comparison with the performance of other companies, organizations or projects. Another disadvantage of existing process assessment techniques is that they are not readily applicable to other types of technologies. For example, existing software process assessment techniques generally cannot be applied to hardware-related process assessment.
A need therefore exists for improved techniques for generating, transforming and displaying information characterizing process assessment, including hardware-related process assessment, such that the information can be more easily understood and more effectively utilized than has heretofore been possible.